Mad Men, Mad World by Lauren M. E. Goodlad, Lilya Kaganovsky, and Robert A. Rushing

LAUREN M. E. GOODLAD LILYA KAGANOVSKY ROBERT A.
RUSHING EDITORS
MADMEN,
MADWORLD
Se x , Pol it ics, st y l e & t he 19 6 0 s
Duke University Press Durham and London 2013
lauren M. e. Goodlad lilya KaGanovsKy robert a. rushinG editors
MadMen,
MadWorld
Sex, Politics, Style, and the 1960s
© 2013 Duke university Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ∞

Designed by Courtney Leigh Baker
Typeset in Arno Pro and Trade Gothic by Tseng Information Systems, Inc.
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Contents
Acknowledgments
ix
Introduction
Lauren M. e. GooDLaD,
LiLya kaGanovsky,
robert a. rushinG
1
Part i
Mad Worlds
one
Maddening Times
Mad Men in Its History
Dana PoLan
35
tWo
Mad Space
Dianne harris
53
three
Representing the Mad Margins of the Early 1960s
Northern Civil Rights and the Blues Idiom
CLarenCe LanG
73
Four
After the Sex, What?
A Feminist Reading of Reproductive History in Mad Men
LesLie J. reaGan
92
Five
The Writer as Producer; or, The Hip Figure after HBO
MiChaeL szaLay
111
Part ii
Mad aesthetiCs
six
The Shock of the Banal
Mad Men’s Progressive Realism
CaroLine Levine
133
seven
Mod Men
JiM hansen
145
eiGht
Swing Skirts and Swinging Singles
Mad Men, Fashion, and Cultural Memory
MabeL rosenheCk
161
nine
Against Depth
Looking at Surface through the Kodak Carousel
irene v. sMaLL
181
ten
“It Will Shock You How Much This Never Happened”
Antonioni and Mad Men
robert a. rushinG
192
Part iii
Made Men
eleven
Media Madness
Multiple Identity (Dis)Orders in Mad Men
Lynne JoyriCh
213
tWelve
“Maidenform”
Masculinity as Masquerade
LiLya kaGanovsky
238
thirteen
History Gets in Your Eyes
Mad Men, Misrecognition, and the Masculine Mystique
JereMy varon
257
Fourteen
The Homosexual and the Single Girl
aLexanDer Doty
279
FiFteen
Mad Men’s Postracial Figuration of a Racial Past
kent ono
300
sixteen
The Mad Men in the Attic
Seriality and Identity in the Modern Babylon
Lauren M. e. GooDLaD
320
Afterword
A Change Is Gonna Come, Same as It Ever Was
MiChaeL bérubé
345
Appendix A
A Conversation with Phil Abraham,
Director and Cinematographer
JereMy varon,
CarL Lehnen
361
Appendix B
List of Mad Men Episodes
381
Works Cited
385
Contributors
411
Index
415
aCKnoWledGMents
Every scholarly work is, in some sense, collaborative, but edited volumes are
particularly so. We thank first and foremost our fantastic contributors for
their hard work and dedication to this project over the past two years. Our
anonymous reviewers were some of the best intellectual interlocutors we
had, and we thank them for their detailed engagement with this volume and
the many ways they helped to make it better. We thank our editor, Courtney
Berger, and everyone at Duke University Press for their enthusiasm for this
book. And we particularly thank our incredibly hardworking graduate stu-
dent research assistants at the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory:
Mike Black, Carl Lehnen, Katherine Skwarczek, and, toward the end of the
project, MC Anderson and Amanda Monson.
All three of the editors of this volume share a common academic home
in the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory at the University of Illi-
nois, Urbana-Champaign, but we also thank our more traditional academic
homes for their support: the Department of English; the Department of
Slavic Languages and Literatures; the Department of Spanish, Italian and
Portuguese; and the Program in Comparative and World Literature. This
project originated in a symposium in Urbana in 2010, and we are grateful to
the many cosponsors and participants, including Pat Gill, Jennifer Greenhill,
Diane Koenker, Michael Rothberg, and Paula Treichler. Nancy Abelmann,
our associate vice chancellor for research in the humanities and arts, brought
the project to the attention of the Campus Research Board at the University
of Illinois, which provided generous funding for copyediting and permis-
sions.
Many, many colleagues and friends contributed to this project—too many
to mention individually—sometimes through their personal support, some-
times through animated discussions about the show, and most often through
both. Jason Mittell’s superb writing on seriality was an inspiration for our
work. Michael Bérubé, Caroline Levine, Dana Polan, and Jeremy Varon were
endlessly generous in providing expertise and illuminating thoughts at vari-
ous stages of this project. They also contributed to the multi-authored series
of posts for seasons 4 and 5 of Mad Men on the Unit for Criticism’s web-
log, Kritik. For their witty and on-the-spot blogging, we are also indebted to
Sandy Camargo, Eleanor Courtemanche, Jim Hansen, Konstantine Klioutch-
kine, Adam Kotsko, Sanja Lacan, Carl Lehnen, Todd McGowan (whose post
brought the blog and this volume to the attention of the New York Times),
and Faith Wilson Stein. For permission to reprint Jerry Yulsman’s stunning
photograph of Dick Gregory and Hugh Hefner at the Playboy Club, we (and
Clarence Lang) thank Barbara Woike and Tom Yulsman. We owe special
thanks to Phil Abraham for his generosity in sharing his time and his insights
from inside the show’s production, as well as Eileen Gillooly for her kindness
in making this introduction.
We thank our families and friends for their support, help, and encourage-
ment with this project (and in particular, our parents, the real Mad Men gen-
eration). Mark Sammons has earned a special note of gratitude for his help
with many things, not least of which was this volume’s title.
Finally, a very special and sad acknowledgment of our colleague, con-
tributor, and friend Alex Doty, who died while this volume was in produc-
tion. Our condolences to his family and friends everywhere—he will be
missed. We are grateful to Corey Creekmur for writing Alex’s contributor
biography.
x aCknowLeDGMents
introduCtion
LiLya kaGanovsky, anD robert a. rushinG
On 16 July 2010 the New York Times online edition ran an interactive fea-
ture on what reviewer Alessandra Stanley, in an accompanying piece, called
a “cultural phenomenon.” The occasion was the season 4 premiere of Mad
Men, scheduled to air nine days later. As most readers of this book know,
Mad Men is an aMC television show about Don Draper, a fictional charac-
ter who is creative director for Sterling Cooper, a fictional New York adver-
tising agency in the 1960s. What stood out in July 2010, therefore, was the
seriousness of the Times reportage, which interspersed photographs from
the 1960s with scenes and stills from a television drama. In a piece labeled
“Seeing History in ‘Mad Men,’” the Times oscillated between describing the
historical 1960s and Mad Men’s characters (Egner). “The Korean War cre-
ated Don Draper,” the newspaper of record wrote, as though asserting a bio-
graphical fact. Mad Men, the Times seemed to say, was creating a window on
the nation’s past through which viewers might experience America’s history
in narrative form. Don Draper was not fiction but biography; Mad Men was
not television but a repository of the past. Pastness itself was redefined as
the past of the 1960s, the past of postwar America, a past of knowable events
about which one might read in the New York Times.
The Times’s soft spot for Mad Men is hardly surprising. The show, set in
the last golden age of print, appeals to the same well-heeled professionals
who read newspapers, re-creating a time before television and the Internet
supplanted broadsheet journalism as the premier venue for news and opin-
ion. Season 4 thus gave us Don announcing his withdrawal from cigarette
advertising in the same venerable pages that had just proclaimed Mad Men
a “cultural phenomenon.” Such paradoxes have become common. An article
on Cary Grant in the August 2010 issue of Vanity Fair opened: “Our story is
set in the years before Mad Men, when Eisenhower was in the White House
and America had only 48 states” (Beauchamp and Balban). What does this
willful conflation of fact with fiction suggest? As the show invites its audi-
ence to look with post–Mad Men eyes on iconic media from the 1960s, is it
reconfiguring our conception of the past?
At one level Mad Men has simply awakened memories of an early-1960s
America that had been lost between the vintage 1950s of Leave It to Beaver
and the late-1960s explosion of Woodstock, feminism, black power, and The
Mod Squad. It is also clear, however, that Mad Men is not simply jostling
memories but creating them: as the historian of the 1960s Jeremy Varon
writes in this volume, “The show is more plausibly the staging of a fantasy
than the rendering of history.” Likewise, as Mabel Rosenheck proposes in
her chapter on fashion, the show’s relation to the vintage artifacts it displays
is performative: an active construction that bespeaks twenty-first century
representation of the 1960s. Thus media commentators on the Mad Men zeit-
geist are not so much seeing the 1960s in the show as seeing them through it.
Their doing so arguably tells us less about the 1960s than about the current
desire for collective memories of the past.
By and large, the essays in this volume do not look to Mad Men for an
accurate depiction of the 1960s, but they do explore the show’s remarkable
impact on how history is experienced. Americans have generally been a pres-
entist people, seldom invoking the past beyond occasional nods to forebears.
Recent soothsayers have announced “the end of history” (the title of Francis
Fukuyama’s bestseller of 1992), as well as technology’s reshaping of the globe
(Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat [2005]). If Mad Men has seemed to
put history back on the map, it is a sign of the show’s groundbreaking ap-
proach to period drama: its use of the forms of historical fiction to capture
and create an intense experience of the present day. In this way, phantas-
matic and millennial though it may be, Mad Men has altered the vision of the
1960s, and of pastness itself.
The show’s ability to do so, we suggest, rests on a few interrelated prem-
ises. First, despite the hype about the show’s historical accuracy, Mad Men
is as selectively anachronistic as it is showily mimetic. Perhaps never before
has a television show been praised so effusively for its “realistic” qualities
and painstaking attention to period details. Fan participation ritualizes this
2 GooDLaD, kaGanovsky, rushinG

fetishism of the detail, with websites such as Natasha Vargas-Cooper’s The
Footnotes of Mad Men following each new episode with research on early-
1960s artifacts and events.1 Viewers get caught up in discussions about the
books in Don’s office, the clothing used to develop principal characters, and
the use of nuanced interiors such as season 3’s update of the Drapers’ living
room or season 4’s creation of a new office space for Sterling Cooper Draper
Pryce.2 Paradoxically, the spotting of occasional inaccuracies (Bryn Mawr
didn’t have sororities when Betty would have attended; the ibM typewriters
featured in the pilot, set in March 1960, weren’t available until 1961; Joan
quotes Marshall McLuhan’s famous phrase “the medium is the message”
three years before it was published) seems to intensify the show’s mimetic
halo, exacerbating the tendency for discourse about the show to “forget” that
it is fictional.
On closer examination, however, Mad Men’s lovingly tended mimicry is
selective and deliberately counterpoised with other features of its diegesis.
Thus, as Lauren M. E. Goodlad observes in this volume, the show’s over-
all realism tends toward a literary naturalism associated with groundbreak-
ing nineteenth-century novels such as Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary
(1856) and Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now (1874–75)—both of
which, like Mad Men, first appeared in serial form. By contrast, the show’s
visual aesthetic (as Robert A. Rushing notes in his chapter) takes its cues
from the most glamorous cinema of the mid-twentieth century, along with
glossy period magazines such as Vogue, Playboy, and Ladies’ Home Journal.
Mad Men thus combines naturalism’s relentless exposure of social pathol-
ogy with a surface allure culled from the most glittering self-representations
of the era. The show’s most significant anachronisms, therefore, are not the
occasional errors, but the conspicuous departures from all but the façade of
the period texts that Mad Men invokes.
the best oF everythinG
In “Six Month Leave” (2.9), wise-guy comedian Jimmy Barrett hails Don
as “the Man in the Gray Flannel Suit,” a reference to Sloan Wilson’s novel
of 1955 and Nunnally Johnson’s film of 1956. Mad Men thus inserts itself
into a period archive that includes Grace Metalious’s Peyton Place (1956)
and Frank O’Hara’s Meditations in an Emergency (1957). To be sure, Don’s
sartorial panache, as performed by Jon Hamm, re-creates the aura of mati-
nee idols such as Gregory Peck, Cary Grant, and Sean Connery (see Jim
Hansen in this volume). Yet despite Jimmy’s determination to peg Don as
introDuCtion 3
a Peck look-alike—“I loved you in Gentleman’s Agreement,” he tells him in
“The Benefactor” (2.3)—Don is hardly the double of characters like Philip
Schuyler Green in Elia Kazan’s movie of 1947, Thomas Rath in The Man in
the Gray Flannel Suit, or Atticus Finch in Robert Mulligan’s To Kill a Mocking-
bird (1962). Don may be a suburban commuter with a wartime secret, but his
problems have little to do with the Fordist-era conformity that Wilson saw
threatening postwar America.
In a memorable scene from The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, three men,
one of whom is Rath, walk into a business meeting wearing nearly identi-
cal garb, an iconic statement of the “uniform of the day” (S. Wilson, 11; fig.
Intro.1). As Catherine Jurca observes, “Tom Rath’s renowned attire” signifies
“the massification of the middle class” and “the deterioration of [its] status
and privilege” (85). Wilson’s answer to this engulfing corporate culture is a
return to moral values: Rath saves his integrity and marriage by telling the
truth about past infidelity, putting family and community before corporate
ambition. Of course, deteriorating middle-class privilege—albeit of a post-
Fordist and neoliberal kind—is a defining experience for Mad Men’s audi-
ence. But Don is hardly a likely candidate for moral redemption. Indeed,
while Mad Men sustains identification with Don by holding out the possi-
bility, even the hope, that he will change or grow in Rath-like manner, it also
makes clear that the impulse to “believe in Don” is the ultimate sucker’s bet
(witness season 4’s Faye Miller as a memorable reminder of the odds).
If Don cannot be Rath—if he is in fact an anti-Rath who casts doubt on
the very idea of male virtue—that is partly because films like Gentleman’s
Agreement, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, and To Kill a Mockingbird are
firm in their conviction that secular progress, however precarious, is achiev-
able through moral agency, an expectation that naturalistic narrative tends
to flummox. Thus, while Rath learns the value of being true to himself, Don
hardly recognizes a boundary between self and self-invention. Though rarely
unfeeling, and even quixotic, Don reflexively brings Madison Avenue to bear
on the non-office world Rath holds sacrosanct. Whereas Rath defines him-
self against the limitations of his job in public relations, Don is an ad man to
the roots of his Brylcreemed hair.
Here is where a second premise behind Mad Men becomes especially sig-
nificant: although the show’s investments in historical contexts are multi-
fold, history functions first and foremost as the material fabric of an arrest-
ing aestheticism. Aestheticism explains how Don Draper—whose very
name suggests the artful donning of masculine drapery—transforms the
well-cut business suit into a mark of nimble self-fashioning. Thus, like much

FiGure intro.1. Gregory Peck in The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1956),
surrounded by colleagues in the “uniform of the day.”
else in the show, the riff on the Man in the Gray Flannel Suit adopts tropes
from a pre-counterculture 1960s to articulate experiences relevant to a post-
counterculture twenty-first century. If this is hardly a magical time machine,
like the “Carousel” Don pitches to Kodak, it represents an innovative play
between mimesis and anachronism.
Then too, it is not only Don but also the show’s strong female charac-
ters whose embedding in “realistic” early-1960s contexts relies on motifs ab-
stracted from period texts. In “Babylon” (1.6), Betty and Don discuss The
Best of Everything, Rona Jaffe’s novel published in 1958 and Jean Negulesco’s
movie of 1959. Mad Men cannily borrows from the movie a template for the
offices of Sterling Cooper (figs. Intro.2–Intro.3) as well as the set piece of the
young woman’s first day at work in a sophisticated Manhattan firm. As Di-
anne Harris writes in her chapter in this volume, “Location lends reality and
authenticity to action.” Mad Men’s borrowing inspiration for its ad agency
interior from Negulesco’s comparable set for Fabian Publishing Co. (based
on Jaffe’s real-life experiences at Fawcett) thus imports the topos of female
clerical workers spatially and professionally ensconced by male executives
(an aspect of midcentury office life that male-centered narratives like Wil-
son’s occlude). As Harris suggests, the extensive open space in which Ster-
ling Cooper’s secretarial staff labors mobilizes “panoptic qualities that not
only permit but actually produce the sexual tensions and sexual harassment”
that make the show so arresting.
Like Mad Men, The Best of Everything is a tell-all tale of the midcentury
working girl. As the movie opens, Caroline Bender (Hope Lange) is a young
secretary starting a new job in the big city, much like Peggy Olson. An-
other secretary, Gregg Adams (1950s supermodel Suzy Parker), is an aspir-
introDuCtion 5
FiGures intro.2–intro.3. Office space in The Best of Everything (1959).
ing actress. Notably, Fabian employs a female editor, Amanda Farrow (Joan
Crawford), who has chosen career over domesticity. The New York Times
review described this genre as a cautionary tale of “the hearth vs. the desk”
(H. Thompson). Behind the comic air of pink opening credits and Johnny
Mathis crooning that “romance” promises “the best of everything,” the film
insists that young women balance the enticements of urban freedom against
the hazards of premarital sex and defeminizing professional ambition.
As in Mad Men, the sexual double standard is everywhere on display:
an older editor, Mr. Shalimar (Brian Aherne), puts his hand on Caroline’s
knee while offering to advance her career; Gregg ends up in the arms of a
ladies’ man (Louis Jourdan) who quickly tires of her; and when another sec-
retary accidentally becomes pregnant, her boyfriend tricks her into thinking
he will marry her while driving her to an abortionist. Less familiar to Mad
Men’s audience is the depiction of career aspirations as antithetical to female
nature. Thus, when Caroline, a Radcliffe graduate, begins making savvy busi-
ness suggestions, the eligible executive Mike Rice (Stephen Boyd) accuses

her of angling for his job. Toward the end, Miss Farrow decides to find do-
mestic happiness with a widower, only to discover that it is “too late” for her
to dispense womanly care. The movie closes with Caroline happy to restore
“the desk” to her returning boss, and to embrace “the hearth” as Mike’s wife-
to-be.
The Best of Everything provides a number of interesting insights into Mad
Men. As Don lies in bed reading Jaffe’s novel, Betty zeroes in on Farrow—
the character whom she least resembles. “Joan Crawford is not what she
was,” she tells Don. “Her, standing next to Suzy Parker—as if they were the
same species. . . . To think, one of the great beauties, and there she is so old”
(1.6). Betty thus refuses the proffered identification with Caroline: a well-
educated, upper-middle-class blonde, much like herself, whose happy end-
ing is marriage to a handsome executive. Instead, she idealizes the youth of
the most self-destructive character, Gregg, who falls to her death from a fire
escape while clinging to the heartless playboy who discards her. Fittingly, the
scene closes with Betty confessing a dependence that recalls Gregg’s desper-
ate need for the errant lover who deems her “suffocating” and “possessive.”
“I want you so much,” Betty whispers. “It’s all in a kind of fog because . . . I
want you so badly.” When Don replies reassuringly, “You have me, you do,”
we know he is lying. If Betty intuits that her storybook marriage to a hand-
some executive is as precarious as Gregg’s affair with an infamous ladies’
man, the reason, of course, is that Don is playing both parts.
Here once again Mad Men reproduces the resplendent surfaces of Holly-
wood cinema while stripping out the stark moral contrasts and idealized do-
mestic norms. This signature fusion of glamour and naturalism works quite
differently from other recent retrospectives such as Todd Haynes’s Far from
Heaven (2002). In this celebrated tribute to Douglas Sirk, Haynes recon-
structs the world of the 1950s—not as it might really have been, but as it was
represented in Sirk’s magnificent Technicolor melodramas. What viewers
and critics loved about Far from Heaven were not only its period details and
capturing of Sirk’s visual richness, but also its filling in of the gaps left in his
narratives. In a literal return of the repressed, homosexuality and interracial
romance are made visible, while vices like cigarettes are hidden. Subtext be-
comes text as Haynes brings to the surface what Sirk circled around and dis-
avowed. In doing so, Haynes seems to correct the movies he commemorates,
taking his revision of midcentury narratives much further than Mad Men’s.
As many critics have noted, Mad Men unmasks—but does not decenter—
the white middle-class narratives that dominated the period. If the risk for
the show is the disturbing dissonance of a luscious mise-en-scène saturated
introDuCtion 7
by jarring prejudice, the risk for Haynes is a complete rupture from what
made Sirk’s aesthetic compelling in the first place—the social tensions that
Hollywood’s mainstream could not yet openly render.
“you’ll love the Way it MaKes you Feel”
Consider historical fiction as it typically appears on television: Foyle’s War

(itv, 2002–) depicts a middle-aged police chief in a small English town dur-
ing the Second World War. In one episode (“Among the Few,” 2.2), Foyle’s
son is training to be a pilot in the Royal Air Force when his squadron-mate
comes under suspicion of a crime. Foyle learns that the young man is inno-
cent of the crime but is homosexual. As most viewers would agree, in the
1940s a provincial policeman’s most likely reaction to discovering that an
raF pilot was homosexual—and in love with his son to boot—would be to
arrest or report him. But Foyle displays an open-minded compassion that
would be unusual in such a figure even today. Foyle’s War thus allows us to
have our enjoyment and eat it, too: viewers can both warm to Foyle and the
glamour of wartime flyboys and have them untarnished by the prejudices
from which the show’s feel-good heroism is abstracted.
Ironically, period shows like Foyle’s War are rarely if ever singled out as
“smug,” while, for some viewers, the charge of smugness clings to Mad Men
like the stale odor of cigarettes. Alongside profuse acclaim from every quarter,
including Emmy Awards for Outstanding Drama for four consecutive years,
Mad Men has been subject to this line of critique from several academic and
literary corners. Thus, according to Sady Doyle in the Atlantic, Mad Men “af-
fords viewers an illusion of moral superiority”; and for Benjamin Schwarz,
also writing in the Atlantic, the show “encourages the condescension of pos-
terity” by inviting its audience “to indulge in a most unlovely—because
wholly unearned—smugness.” Both writers echo Mark Greif’s earlier claim
in the London Review of Books that “Mad Men is an unpleasant little entry in
the genre of Now We Know Better.” In the most extensive critique so far,
Daniel Mendelsohn argues in the New York Review of Books that the show’s
“attitude toward the past is glib and its self-positioning in the present is un-
attractively smug.” Why is a show that lays bare the racism, sexism, and deca-
dence of the past judged to be self-congratulatory, when more conventional
historical fare spares viewers entirely from reflecting on injustice? The ques-
tion points to a set of ongoing debates about Mad Men that this volume ex-
plores in multiple ways.3
To be sure, Mad Men does not have the mass appeal of a network hit. For

some audiences the pace is unnervingly slow. Many viewers old enough to
have experienced the 1960s report that Mad Men brings back memories they
would rather forget. Similarly, some younger viewers find realistic depic-
tion of racism and misogyny too uncomfortable to tolerate. For still other
audiences, Mad Men’s aestheticism is itself an obstacle to pleasure. As one
colleague mused, “I think I may be too personally ambivalent about style
to have the same response . . . as some of my better-dressed friends. I hate
myself at some level if I spend too much time on clothes and décor.” The as-
sumption here is that watching Mad Men entails positive embrace, perhaps
even emulation, of its glamorous style (although plenty of Mad Men watch-
ers neither sport vintage fashion nor throw elegant cocktail parties). Then
too, some male viewers find it difficult to identify with the show’s spectacu-
larly flawed protagonist. “I think Don is harder to take for men than [for]
women,” writes one interlocutor. “Heterosexual women can likely assume
that he is hardly relationship material, and fantasize about pleasure without
strings or commitment. But for men, he’s a threat—someone who sinks their
esteem and incurs a sense that ‘life isn’t fair’ insofar as a mysterious lout is
rewarded with his choice of beautiful women.”4 Writing on his blog, Just tv,
the television scholar Jason Mittell wrestles with the disconnect between his
critical “habitus” and his reflexive “dislike” for the show: “I fully acknowl-
edge that it is a ‘good’ series. . . . It is objectively better made . . . than the vast
majority of programs airing on American television. But . . . I would rather
watch many programs that are less well-made, less intelligent, and less ambi-
tious, as I find them more satisfying and pleasurable” (“On Disliking”). Such
reactions not only illustrate the intense feelings the show incites, they also
suggest that part of understanding Mad Men’s strong appeal means recog-
nizing that it is not for everyone.
Still, it is worth pointing out that none of these reactions is at all self-
congratulatory. For Caroline Levine, writing in this volume, shows like Mad
Men and The Sopranos (hbo, 1999–2007) give us characters who, despite
their flaws, are too compelling to enable the thorough detachment that a
smug attitude requires. Mad Men “does not invite us to displace pernicious
assumptions about sexism, racism, and homophobia onto an exotic, far-off
place or time,” she argues, “but brings them just close enough to us to give
us [a] feeling of uncanny familiarity.” Following Levine, one needs to ask,
Who are these smug viewers whom Mad Men allegedly flatters? In Greif’s
analysis, unexamined hostility toward the show and its cast stands in for the
answer. Assessing the role of Draper, Greif writes, “[Jon] Hamm looks per-
petually wimpy and underslept. His face is powdered and doughy. He lacks
introDuCtion 9
command. He is witless. The pose that he’s best at, interestingly, is leaning
back in his chair; it ought to be from superiority, but it looks as though he is
trying to dodge a blow.” One can appreciate the critical bravado here with-
out being convinced by the argument it purports to confirm: Is it likely that
Mad Men “flatters us” because its leading man looks doughy and witless?
Doyle’s feminist analysis also invites questions. Disturbed that audiences
do not recognize that Joan Holloway was raped by her fiancé in season 3—
not “sort of ” raped—Doyle unaccountably blames the show: “our inability
to identify misogyny, even on a show that presents it so melodramatically,”
points to the persistence of sexism. While Doyle is surely right about con-
tinuing sexism, she offers no evidence for the theory that Mad Men some-
how obscures this reality. “We can’t face [sexism] directly unless we’re as-
sured that it’s behind us,” Doyle claims. When she cites a female story editor
who explains that several incidents depicted on Mad Men “come directly
from experiences that I and the other women writers have had in our life-
times,” Doyle seems to think that viewers will be shocked to hear it. This
presumption of a gullible audience, indulged by a show that panders to its
weakness, echoes the premise embedded in Greif’s title—“You’ll Love the
Way It Makes You Feel.” Adopted from the tagline that Peggy writes for a
weight-loss device–cum–vibrator, Greif’s title likens watching Mad Men to
masturbation. In a comparable essay, Anna Kelner of Ms. worries that Mad
Men “is crafting a whole new generation of would-be Bettys (Draper’s stylish
wife) not Peggys (the show’s ambitious ‘career girl’).” Yet since many view-
ers dislike Betty (or, perhaps, love to hate her), the commentary surround-
ing this much-criticized character hardly suggests that the show is inspir-
ing female viewers to become neurotic housewives and unhappy mothers.
Instead, viewers’ favorite female characters by far are Joan, Peggy, and the
unforgettable Rachel Menken from season 1—all three formidable “career
girls” whose stories underline the tensions between marriage and work.5
Condescension is also at play in Mendelsohn’s critique, though to do this
essay justice, many of its perceptions are accurate: Mad Men’s plotlines are
melodramatic; its interiors airless and “boxed”; and the style of acting it cul-
tivates, mannered and flat. But Mendelsohn’s tack is less to elucidate how
such supposed flaws produce “unattractive” smugness than to establish the
viewer as rube: “That a soap opera decked out in high-end clothes (and con-
cepts) should have received so much acclaim and is taken so seriously re-
minds you that fads depend as much on the willingness of the public to
believe as on the cleverness of people who invent them.” This critical con-
descension concerns characters and viewers alike: “The writers don’t really

want you to think about what Betty might be thinking; they just want you
to know that she’s one of those clueless 1960s mothers who smoked during
pregnancy.” This said about a character who is on to her husband’s infidelity
from the start, who takes out her neighbor’s pet pigeons with a shotgun—
a woman who is complex and frustrated enough to lure a friend into a vicari-
ous affair while she herself has sex with a stranger in a public rest room. Can
it really be true that none of this prompts viewers to ponder what Betty is
thinking?
In what is perhaps his most damning criticism, Mendelsohn argues that
the writing in Mad Men is “very much like the writing you find in ads.” This
interesting analysis of Mad Men and advertising (a topic explored in this
volume by Lynne Joyrich, Lilya Kaganovsky, Lauren M. E. Goodlad, and
Michael Bérubé) might be different if Mendelsohn did not accept the much-
hyped premise of a show that accurately documents America’s history. As
several contributors to this volume show, Mad Men is less interested in re-
producing 1960s advertising than in capturing what the late-capitalist social
world surrounding advertising means to viewers watching the show today.
Like the best historical fiction, the show adopts resonant material from the
past to speak audibly to the present. Historical realism of this kind directly
contrasts with the “capitalist realism” that Michael Schudson, in one of the
most penetrating studies of the topic to date, aligns with advertising. What
advertisements portray, writes Schudson, is “relatively placeless,” “relatively
timeless,” “abstracted,” and “self-contained” (211). Yet while advertisements
do not depict particular realities, they strive for the illusion of reality as such.
The “rich, cinematic, often crowded detail in magazine ads and television
commercials” bespeaks an “obsessive attention to making every detail look
‘right’” (217).
Mendelsohn’s analysis is thus partly right: Mad Men captures the look
and, at times, the feel of a 1960s advertisement; it does so, however, not to
flatter us but to defamiliarize a millennial condition that is entirely our own.
Mendelsohn’s blind spot on the show’s contemporaneity is especially strik-
ing in his analysis of Salvatore Romano’s closeted gay identity. Sal’s season 3
story line, he objects, “isn’t really about the closet at all.” Of course, the point
is debatable given that Don, who discovers Sal’s secret while the two are
traveling together, is in a closet himself—which, as Alexander Doty shows
in this volume, endows their interactions with multiple tensions. But for
Mendelsohn the show fails because it diverges from accurate documenta-
tion. Noting that Sal is fired after he rebuffs the sexual advance of the firm’s
most important client, Mendelsohn protests: “That’s not a story about gay-
introDuCtion 11
ness in the 1960s . . . it’s a story about caving in to power, a story about busi-
ness ethics.” He may be the only writer today who thinks that Americans
should not be watching more television stories about business ethics.
Similarly, Greif thinks he has found the smoking gun when he points out
that “It’s toasted,” the slogan Don produces in “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes”
(1.1), was “first used by Lucky Strike not in 1960 but in 1917.” The scene pivots
on Don’s need to surmount the daunting marketing problem cigarette ad-
vertisers faced in 1960, after facts about smoking and cancer began to spill
into the popular press. Whereas all advertising contends with the need to
differentiate brands that are virtually indistinguishable, tobacco advertising
peddles products that are indistinguishably toxic. Seizing on a toasting pro-
cess that all cigarette manufacturers employ, Don articulates a special in-
stance of the marketing strategy that Rosser Reeves, the legendary execu-
tive at Ted Bates, called the “unique selling proposition”: the elevation of a
particular feature (such as chocolate that melts in your mouth, not in your
hands) to the status of a brand’s inimitable raison d’être. Thus when Don’s
tagline replaces a pernicious universal (“Everybody else’s tobacco is poison-
ous”) with an abstracted particular (“Lucky Strike’s is toasted”), it shows
how advertising disarticulates an illusory freedom of choice from the actual
constraints and perilous addictions of consumer capitalism. Since the show
is dramatic fiction, it no more matters that Lucky Strike used this slogan
long before the proven cancer link than that “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” is
borrowed from a song written in 1933. Greif goes on to point out that in the
1950s and ’60s, advertisers were “eager to believe in a Svengali model of mass
persuasion. The black-magic prestige of professional psychology was at its
height.” It never seems to occur to him that the writers of Mad Men mute this
midcentury scientism, with its strong echoes of The Man in the Gray Flannel
Suit, in order to engage in deliberate anachronism.
it’s not a sCienCe
It is not just any anachronistic account of advertising that Mad Men con-
structs, but a rich one that over-layers the Brave New World of midcentury
behaviorism with a story about countercultural cooptation told by Thomas
Frank in The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of
Hip Consumerism (1997). The advertising of the 1950s and early 1960s, Frank
explains, was of a piece with a business culture known for “soul-deadening
conformity” and “empty consumerism” (7). Guided by leading lights, such
as “Father of Advertising” David Ogilvy, the agencies of this period viewed

their work as a science, adopting the bureaucratic hierarchies and managerial
style of the Fordist corporation. Under Reeves, Ted Bates’s ads favored repe-
titious taglines and scientific endorsements. Advertising, Reeves claimed in
Reality in Advertising, does not need copywriters who indulge in a “solip-
sist universe,” like Tennyson’s “Lady of Shalott,” but rather, professionals
under “the strict discipline of attaining a commercial goal” (121–22). Like-
wise, Ogilvy subjected the creative process to time-tested rules, scientific
positivism, and managerial control. Critical of any approach that smacked
of “the mystique of the Bauhaus,” he warned in Confessions of an Advertising
Man that “aesthetic intangibles do not increase sales” (121). In such a con-
text, books like Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders (1957) could describe
a manipulative ad industry that used psychological research to “probe our
everyday habits” (12). Packard’s argument was part of a growing anticorpo-
rate critique that included David Riesman, Nathan Glazer, and Reuel Den-
ney’s The Lonely Crowd (1950) and William H. Whyte’s The Organization Man
(1956), as well as fiction such as Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit
and Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road (1961). Sixties counterculture was, in
this sense, the fruit of rebellious energies defined in opposition to business
and advertising.
Thomas Frank, however, rejects this simple contrast between corporation
and counterculture. He argues that business culture not only coopted the
storied rebellions of the 1960s but also anticipated and in some ways fueled
them. The epicenter of this corporate insurrection was an advertising indus-
try that had burst the bonds of Fordism and liberated its inner hipster. By
the end of the decade, Frank writes, “advertising would . . . transform itself
from a showplace of managerial certainty” to a “corporate celebration of car-
nivalesque difference” (49–50). This was, in effect, to demote researchers, ac-
count executives, and upper management in favor of the copywriters, artists,
and creative directors whom Ogilvy had dismissed as “the Bauhaus brigade”
(124). As ads began to mock and ironize the bromides that Madison Ave-
nue had once proudly blazoned, the end result was commodification of the
counterculture and the rise of a “cool” consumerism.
Although this transformation extended into the 1970s, the first major
salvo came in 1959 when Doyle Dane Bernbach’s (DDb) Volkswagen ads
“altered the look, language, and tone of American advertising” (Frank, 55).
Bill Bernbach, the leader behind this coup, would become an “enfant ter-
rible” and “hero among creatives” (Twitchell, 193; Schudson, 57). With an
almost Wildean flair for aphorism, Bernbach declared that advertising was
an art, that rules were meant for artists to break, and that “the real giants
introDuCtion 13
FiGure intro.4. Harry and Sal discuss the Volkswagen “Lemon” ad
(“Marriage of Figaro,” 1.3).
have always been poets, men who jumped from facts into the realm of ideas”
(qtd. in Frank, 57). By the late 1960s, agencies were increasingly following
DDb’s example: they dethroned management, assembled charismatic cre-
ative teams, and even argued with clients. Advertising, for a time, became
“anti-advertising,” a proto-postmodern ironization of consumer capitalism
(Frank, 68).
Of course, the Sterling Cooper depicted in the first three seasons of Mad
Men is precisely the kind of white shoe agency that preexisted DDb’s rise
to prominence in the early 1960s. Whereas rising stars like Bernbach and
the Volkswagen copywriter Julian Koenig were Jewish, Sterling Cooper’s
lone Jewish employee works in the mailroom. In “Marriage of Figaro” (1.3),
Sterling Cooper’s writers nervously eye the Volkswagen “Lemon” ad (fig.
Intro.4). In “Babylon,” when a representative from the Israeli Tourist Board
declares her intention to compare Sterling Cooper’s “traditional” offerings
to DDb’s, Don tartly replies that “Sterling Cooper doesn’t like to think of
itself as traditional.” Moreover, Ken Cosgrove and Pete Campbell recall
Rosser Reeves in nurturing literary aspirations. That is, the same utilitarian
technocrat who exhorted admen to “believe only what they can weigh, mea-
sure, calculate, and observe” had another side to his character (Reeves, 153).
Reeves would go on to write a semiautobiographical novel about a poet-hero
who leaves behind millions to become the kind of Greenwich Village bohe-
mian with whom Don cavorts in season 1. Indeed, Don himself considers a
comparable escape into the hedonism of California in season 2.

While Mad Men thus dramatizes the tensions between research, accounts,
and creative, the overall effect is historical composite, not reenactment of
the DDb-led creative revolution. Set in 1960, the pilot already constructs
Don as creative impresario and aligns market research with the professo-
rial Dr. Greta Guttman, whose Freudian shibboleths seem out of touch. It is
not until season 4, by which point Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce is a fledg-
ling start-up, that Dr. Faye Miller represents a sophisticated form of market
research in tension with creative instincts. When Faye’s focus group sug-
gests that Peggy’s idea for a cold cream ad centered on self-indulgent rituals
will be less successful than a campaign promising matrimony, Don insists
that advertising’s job is to invent ideas consumers have not yet imagined
for themselves (“The Rejected,” 4.4). Pete illustrates the ascendency of this
Bernbachian ethos when he shows off Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce’s up-
to-date Creative Lounge. Pointing out the youthful ambience to prospective
clients, he says, “We can’t tell you how it happens, but it does happen here”
(“The Chrysanthemum and the Sword,” 4.5). Meanwhile, the ever more ir-
relevant Roger, a product of the Reeves generation, pens his risible memoir,
Sterling’s Gold.
Advertising thus provides a structure for exploring the moral quanda-
ries of a corrupting world. Although this is not a documentary portrait of
Madison Avenue in the 1960s, it captures resonant features of the zeitgeist
while using specific campaigns to shape story worlds in multiple ways: for
example, the brilliant Kodak “Carousel” pitch discussed in Irene Small’s
chapter. Turning “surface into depth,” according to Small’s masterful read-
ing, the pitch provides a fitting close to season 1’s narrative of mounting de-
spair, just as season 3’s “Limit Your Exposure” ad underlines the continuing
theme of closeted identity (Doty, this volume). In her chapter on “Maiden-
form” (2.6), an episode named after a brand, Kaganovsky shows how an ad-
vertising campaign subtends Mad Men’s sophisticated play with gendered
spectatorship.
Some of the most memorable accounts, such as season 1’s Nixon cam-
paign and Israeli tourism bid, do not culminate in scripted pitches but in-
stead percolate into the show’s narrative substrate. In 1963 when the Ken-
nedy campaign hired DDb, they signaled their attunement with the changes
that led to the creative revolution. But the point of making Sterling Cooper
Nixon’s choice, according to Michael Szalay, is to isolate Don’s embodi-
ment of the ascendant “hipness” that structures the show’s depiction of
race (“Mad Style”). Thus, according to Szalay’s chapter in this volume, the
adman-artist is a Maileresque “hipster manqué” and Don, a symbolic black
introDuCtion 15
FiGure intro.5. Ann-Margret in Bye Bye Birdie (1963) (“Love among the Ruins,” 3.2).
man (like his silhouette in the credits) trying to pass for white. Likewise, in
Goodlad’s reading, Don’s resistance to selling Israel as a global commodity
reveals his ambivalence toward a position of Judaized exile and otherness.
In all of these ways, Mad Men uses advertising to glimpse the structures that
make 1960s history palpable in our own day.
Still, while Mad Men has not yet scripted ads in the DDb style, the show
itself is frequently self-referential, metatextual, and ironic. As Don says to
the hapless client he manipulates in “The Hobo Code” (1.8), if advertising is
not a religion, it’s also “not a science.” Like Don making his pitch, Mad Men
understands very well that it is putting on a show, constructing the fetish
of the magical time machine. Indeed, the show underscores its artifice, re-
minding viewers that they are watching a “remake” of the 1960s that should
never be taken for the original.6 To see this self-referential aspect at work
we need go no further than advertising (of course): for example, Sal’s failed
Patio commercial. “Love among the Ruins” (3.2) opens with the first bars
of “Bye Bye Birdie,” and when the screen fades in from black, we are watch-
ing George Sidney’s film of 1963 (fig. Intro.5). When the scene cuts from the
actress to reaction shots from the Sterling Cooper boardroom, viewers do a
double take as they find themselves caught within the mise en abyme world
of fictional representation. The client’s idea for Patio, a new diet cola, is to
replicate the opening sequence of Bye Bye Birdie “frame for frame.” “Is it just
a knock-off?” Peggy asks. “Are we allowed to make fun of it at least?” But

while Peggy thus gestures toward the ironic stance that was making DDb’s
ads all the rage, the men in the room cannot see past Ann-Margret’s charms.
Although Sal’s remake is a technical success, both the ad men and the clients
recoil from it, as if they are seeing an uncanny double. Ken and Don point
out that the commercial is “an exact copy, frame for frame” and exactly what
the clients had asked for, but the two clients insist that there’s something
“not right about it.” As Roger sums it up, “It’s not Ann-Margret.”
The problem is not simply that we have a copy in place of the original. As
Slavoj Žižek suggests, “the more formally identical the remake, the more pal-
pable the difference between original and copy.” “Sameness” underscores the
“uncanny difference” particular to each version’s “underlying libidinal econ-
omy” (Enjoy Your Symptom, 234–35). Thus as Sal’s wife, Kitty, watches him
reenact the Bye Bye Birdie scene, she realizes the “truth” about Sal’s sexuality.
Sal’s “exact copy” of Ann-Margret is a kind of “drag” which produces an am-
bivalence that gets coded in the ad as “pretend” or “off.” The ad is not queer
because Sal is, it is queer because there is an added layer of meaning that
the viewer (both inside and outside the show) cannot help but understand,
which adds something to the original and decenters it.7 Mad Men repeats the
opening scene of Bye Bye Birdie five times over several episodes, and the un-
canny repetition points to the problem of the “remake” as a whole, which in
trying to produce sameness always ends up with difference. In this way, Mad
Men has some fun with its own fetish for period accuracy as it “remakes”
the 1960s.
the FoG
Historically, the 1960s marked the last great expansion of middle-class pros-
perity and the crest of U.S. prestige; but globalizing currents were already
under way that would make borders more porous and place transnational
capital beyond the reach of the nation-state’s regulatory oversight. Paradoxi-
cally then, the same revolutionary trends that enabled hip consumerism to
thrive on the growing cultural and economic power of women, students,
African Americans, Catholics, Jews, and other minorities, eventually pro-
moted the so-called free market as the perfect arbiter of every need and
desire, constituting neoliberalism as we know it. For several contributors,
the secret to Mad Men’s appeal is Don’s ability to figure this unassimilable
doubleness.
The point of such readings, however, is not to posit Mad Men as a utopian
text. Writing in this volume, Dana Polan notes that the show does not take its
introDuCtion 17
meditation on “madness” from pioneering media like Joseph Heller’s Catch-
22 (1961) or Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1964), which saw madness
as a source of revolutionary political potential. Leslie J. Reagan’s chapter
makes a comparable point about Mad Men’s depiction of reproductive prac-
tices: while the show portrays Peggy’s gynecological exam with painstaking
accuracy, its engagement of abortion rights is less radical than the television
show it cites—the groundbreaking episode of The Defenders aired in 1962
from which Mad Men’s “The Benefactor” (2.3) borrows its title. This delib-
erate distance from a counterculture that is always imminent but never quite
born is one of the several ways through which the show engages a present-
day neoliberalism that handily channels revolutionary energy—an impasse
that shapes the Mad World that we know. Nevertheless, such fidelity to a
post-1960s–as–pre-1960s stance on the longue durée is bound to strike some
commentators as an acceptance of what is.
Although some readers may disagree, we think it unlikely that Mad Men
spurs nostalgia for the 1960s housewife. Indeed, given the vogue for male
protagonists with fascinating secret lives—a feature integral to The Sopranos,
Breaking Bad (aMC, 2008–), and Dexter (Showtime, 2006–)—Mad Men
stands out for its reliance on strongly developed female characters. By con-
trast, even a profoundly novelistic show like The Wire (hbo, 2002–8) focuses
primarily on relationships between men. Katie Roiphe may declare that Mad
Men incites the “tiniest bit of wistfulness” for the prefeminist era (“On ‘Mad
Men’”). But as the historian Claire B. Potter argues, Roiphe seems to miss
the show’s point: “The retro fashion and perfect sets only provide a brittle
frame for a fraying heteropatriarchal culture.” Like Potter, we think that
viewers recognize the difference between midcentury aesthetics and pre-
feminist inequality, distinguishing readily between the sexy and the sexist.
We also agree with Potter that the show is not “sexist and racist” but
rather “provides a forum for pondering sexism and racism.” And yet we are
not surprised that the determination to provoke reflection by rendering
white middle-class America in all its glaring privilege and insularity (what
Kent Ono in this volume calls “demographic realism”) causes consternation
for some viewers, including contributors to this book.8 Thus Latoya Peterson
argues that Mad Men is “afraid of race,” refusing to “engage” the world of mi-
nority characters like Carla (the Drapers’ housekeeper) and Hollis (the ele-
vator operator in Sterling Cooper’s office tower) (“Afraid”). Clarence Lang’s
chapter in this volume proposes a different view. When Hollis tells Pete that
African Americans have “bigger problems to worry about than tv,” the inter-
action, Lang notes, does more than accurately depict the inequality between

the two men. Rather, the scene in “The Fog” (3.5) “acknowledges the sea
change occurring in U.S. race relations” as blacks like Hollis began to gain
power as consumers. Lang goes on to describe a blues-oriented “cool” in dia-
logue with the era’s black freedom struggles, arguing that Mad Men’s story
world would be enriched if hipsters of color made their mark beyond the
suggestive credits sequence. Jeremy Varon concludes on a similar note, urg-
ing that social movements of the 1960s remain crucial because of the “moral
imagination and impulse for change” that they display—examples of which
Mad Men might also inspire in its viewers.
In what is perhaps the most nuanced theoretical take on Mad Men and
race to date, Ono argues that the show is symptomatic of postracism, a
cultural condition “premised on the assumption that race and racism are
. . . passé.” Thus a character like Carla is there to signify “Mad Men’s self-
conscious awareness of the fact that racism existed in the 1960s.” By not
showing more, however, the show not only demonstrates “the irrelevance of
her personal life to white people in the 1960s” but also “objectionably pro-
duces the irrelevance of her personal life to television viewers now.” While
this is the strongest critique of Mad Men and race in the volume, the desire
to see Carla rendered more fully is shared by several contributors and doubt-
less many viewers. By contrast, Bérubé’s afterword argues that the impulse to
wish that Mad Men “follow Carla home” is mistaken. Although it would be
pleasurable “to transcend the Drapercentric worldview,” to insist on it is to
demand that the series “accommodate more of What We Know Now by let-
ting us see what the white inhabitants of Mad World neither knew nor cared
about.” Bérubé thus joins Ta-Nehisi Coates in judging the strategic focus on
white perspectives to be “incredibly powerful,” an important “statement on
how privilege, at its most insidious, really works” (“Race”).
We do not propose to settle this debate, but we do wish to highlight its
complexity and significance. If criticism of Mad Men’s white perspective
often reproduces a familiar plaint about the limitations of realism, there is
clearly more to say: both about the value of unvarnished depictions of white
racism and about the formal capacities of naturalistic realism. As rendered
in the first four seasons of Mad Men, Carla (Deborah Lacey), without a last
name or a home we can see, is nonetheless a powerful presence whose facial
expressions, body movements, and careful speech convey more than mere
measure of her time onscreen suggests (fig. Intro.6). Confuting the perni-
cious trope of the Good White People who enable racial progress (Bérubé,
this volume), Carla equally evades the opposing trap of the “magic negro”—
the pitfall to which Far from Heaven’s idealized African American gardener
introDuCtion 19
FiGure intro.6. Carla’s silent presence (“The Chrysanthemum and the Sword,” 4.5).
arguably succumbs.9 Yet while we share Coates’s view that the show’s white
vision “works,” we also find it interesting that Mad Men director Phil Abra-
ham thinks that a glimpse of Carla’s family would be “cool” and consistent
with the show we know (see appendix A). From Abraham’s perspective, if
Mad Men “fears race,” it is because the creators do not wish their white pro-
gressivism to overwrite the exclusions of the past.
Taken as a whole, the essays in this volume suggest that there is no single
formula to explain what Mad Men gets right or wrong about race. The device
of embedding story lines in the ebb and flow of history works at different
levels and with different degrees of success: brilliant, for example, when the
breakdown of the Draper marriage plays out against the “thirteen days” of
the missile crisis; far less so when excerpts from “I Have a Dream” provide
the background for Don’s pursuit of Sally’s teacher. A minor black female
character may work well to support Paul Kinsey’s pompous variation on the
Good White Person and less well in a plotline about a British expat’s predi-
lection for “chocolate.” Resisting the charms of an attractive “Asian waitress”
may make sense in a scene about Don’s guilty capitulation to corporate im-
peratives, whereas portraying Honda’s executives as hapless dupes, caught in
their Japanese culture, seems downright un–Mad Men–like.

Mad Men yourselF
It is testimony to Mad Men’s status as a “cultural phenomenon” that in intro-

ducing a collection of essays on the topic, one finds much to say before dis-
cussing the series as a television show. Mad Men surely belongs to the ele-
vated category of quality television, a term denoting the kind of writerly cable
drama that entered the scene with hbo’s now classic series The Sopranos.10
While The Sopranos is an obvious forerunner for Mad Men in being the show
Matthew Weiner helped to produce in the years before launching his own
series (see Szalay, this volume), there are various ways in which Mad Men
connects to other “quality” series.
One of those ways is audience. Mad Men has grown steadily more popu-
lar: from the one million viewers who watched the premiere in 2007 to the
three and a half million viewers for the fifth-season premiere in 2012 (Kon-
dolojy). If these are not especially large numbers by network television stan-
dards, they are respectable for a cable drama.11 Moreover, like The Sopranos
and The Wire, Mad Men is a prestigious critical success that singlehandedly
established aMC as a destination for quality tv. Although Breaking Bad, with
a similar size audience, is also acclaimed, it is Mad Men that explores its posi-
tion as the flagship series for a network attempting to make its mark (see
Joyrich, this volume).
Mad Men’s viewership is also considerably larger than the audience for
each broadcast. In 2010 it was the number- one show among the “time-
shifted” viewers who watch a show after it airs on recording devices such as
TiVo (Nielsenwire, 2). Moreover, digital recording is only one form of time-
shifting. Mad Men viewers who dislike commercial interruption may down-
load a “Season Pass” from iTunes and watch digital files at their leisure. Then
too, a whole set of additional viewers watches the show months or even years
later on DvD.
If Mad Men attracts fewer viewers than the most popular network shows,
the viewers it attracts are notably affluent. According to the Hollywood Re-
porter, more than half of the households that watch Mad Men earn more than
$100,000 per year, making these “the wealthiest fans in all of cable tv land.”
Such viewers can afford cable, Dvr, iTunes, and possibly even the bMws
frequently advertised during the series’ season premiers (Armstrong). One
might also hypothesize that Mad Men’s viewers are more media-centered
than other viewers. The cinematic character of quality tv is enhanced by un-
interrupted viewing, or by viewing the show as an “event” (for example, the
numerous Mad Men–themed parties that accompany each season’s opening
introDuCtion 21
installments, including one in Times Square, New York, for the third-season
premiere).12
According to Advertising Age, liberals are 124 percent more likely to watch
Mad Men than conservatives (Bulk).13 Although we found no firm data to
support it, our impression is that most viewers of the show are at least thirty
years of age (many of our graduate students watch Mad Men but only those
undergraduates with interest in topics such as film studies or fashion do).
It therefore seems safe to surmise that the show’s viewers are relatively
wealthy, politically liberal, and technologically “plugged-in.” Although there
is no hard data on the racial demographics of the viewership, popular imagi-
nation has the show’s fans as white (Mad Men appears as number 123 on the
satirical blog Stuff White People Like, just below Moleskine notebooks).
Of course, while Mad Men viewers may often be white, they need not
be Americans or residents of the United States. That is, Mad Men is not
only about globalization but also a product of it: a quintessential Ameri-
can cultural export in telling a story about the height of U.S. hegemony that
speaks to Britons, Czechs, Danes, Finns, Hungarians, South Koreans, and
Ukrainians, among others. (When the show aired in Turkey, it was fined for
excessive onscreen smoking.) Receiving an award in Cologne, after watching
himself and Elisabeth Moss (Peggy Olson) dubbed into German, Jon Hamm
told reporters, “It seems incredible that something that seems so specific to
a particular time and place in America . . . can reach an international audi-
ence” (Roxborough). But the fact is in many ways predictable. Mad Men’s
Madison Avenue is a hub in a global network, an industry that produces ad
campaigns for Hilton Hotels, Rio de Janeiro, and Haifa alongside public re-
lations campaigns for the new Penn Station. Stylistically, the show illustrates
a high-modernist chic that resonates even in places where Ossining, New
York—the original Draper family hometown—has never been heard of. Will
Mad Men one day air in Bangalore, Beijing, Johannesburg, or Kuala Lum-
pur? We do not know, but we imagine that it is already playing on iPads and
DvDs in these and many other global nodes. The show’s aestheticization of
the alienation to which globalization gives rise seems to translate into many
languages.
Mad Men’s audience ranges from occasional viewers to those for whom
the show is “destination tv.” There are also relatively intense fans who meet
for live discussion, stage Mad Men–themed parties, and even produce origi-
nal art or fiction set in the world of Mad Men—all typical fan rituals. In one
of the best-known iterations of such activities, Mad Men enthusiasts created
the Internet application MadMenYourself.com, which was eventually incor-

porated into aMC’s website. The site enables users to design their own Mad
Men–inspired icons to match their gender and appearance, complete with
vintage fashion and hair. Blogging on the show on Just tv, the television
scholar Jason Mittell invokes the category of the “acafan,” or academic fan
(“On Disliking”). Although none of the editors of this book is likely ever to
own a bMw, we think it fair to acknowledge that some readers may judge the
writing of scholarly articles and books to constitute a fan ritual all its own.
While aMC invites Mad Men fans to call themselves “Maddicts,” Satur-
day Night Live ridiculed fans as “Mad Mennies” in a skit hosted by Mad Men
actor January Jones in November 2009. The piece depicted fans as obsessed
eccentrics, dressing like characters and memorizing the dialogue. When
Jones opined that such fans are “like Trekkies,” the “Mad Mennies” invoked
the narcissism of small differences: “Trekkies are losers who live with their
parents and pretend they’re in space. We live with our parents and pretend
we work in advertising—much cooler!” Of course, Saturday Night Live can
hardly claim immunity to the malady: Hamm’s three SNL appearances in-
clude two parodies of his performance as Don that have been viewed on the
Internet thousands of times. Meanwhile, cast and crew members from Mad
Men have been interviewed on the National Public Radio show Fresh Air no
fewer than four times—another indication, like Frank Rich’s admiring col-
umns in the New York Times or even our own Unit for Criticism and Inter-
pretive Theory series of Kritik blog posts on the last two seasons—that Mad
Men enthusiasm is taken seriously in some quarters.14 There is perhaps a fine
line between participating in these relatively elite forms of appreciation and
the kind of fandom SNL simultaneously ridicules and perpetuates.
Many scholarly studies (e.g., Bacon-Smith; Jenkins, Convergence Culture;
Penley) argue that fan activities resist dominant models of passive consump-
tion, constructing “practices of everyday life” that creatively reuse the culture
industry’s materials (de Certeau). More recent studies (e.g., Sandvoss) sug-
gest that fan activities simply represent the minimum amount of “play” nec-
essary for consumerism to function. Mad Men fans offer some evidence for
both views. On the one hand, some fan activities appear to be disconnected
from consumer tie-ins such as the Banana Republic campaigns in which
huge placards of the show’s stars are plastered on city streets and shopping
mall windows. In contrast to such corporate fare, Mad Men fans have pro-
duced, for example, cakes that incorporate images of the show’s stars or offi-
cial logos, but not always in ways that reproduce aMC’s interests.15 Likewise,
Mad Men fan fiction runs the gamut from tame drabbles such as Mary Jane
Parker’s tale of Sally helping Joan in the office (“The Name on the Door”),
introDuCtion 23
to elaborate narratives about the sexual lives of the show’s characters such
as “Portrait of a One Night Stand” by kasviel in which Don “punishes” Pete
for revealing his alter ego—with spanking and sex.16 Such fan activities gen-
erate new objects for private consumption that are unlikely to appear on
aMC’s website. If such “resistance” is clearly limited, it does take Mad Men
fan participation beyond the passive consumption of imitation 1960s furni-
ture, cocktail shakers, and Brooks Brothers knock-offs of vintage fashion.
That said, Mad Men enthusiasts do use fan communities to talk about
products they would like to buy. For example, Basket of Kisses, a popular
Mad Men blog focused on discussion of the show, features a “What to Buy”
link displaying products such as dolls, cufflinks, and DvDs. The website has
asked its readers, “What props from Mad Men do you covet? It can be furni-
ture, highball glasses, a cigarette lighter, anything. Do you adore mid-century
styling? . . . ’Fess up” (Lipp). What is, perhaps, unusual about Mad Men’s
fandom is that its mainstream demographic—affluent fans of an award-
winning series and subject of much nPr and New York Times chatter—must
still “’fess up” to desiring common objects like a set of highball glasses. This
suggests that media fandom and consumption may be mutually sustaining.
Indeed, there may be an extra thrill for the purchaser of that midcentury
cigarette lighter who not only acquires a coveted object but also does so for
reasons that are socially suspect (his or her “embarrassing” media fandom)
and potentially libidinally charged (think of Sally Draper watching The Man
from U.N.C.L.E. [4.5]).
toMorroWland
If Mad Men is “cinematic” television at its finest, it is television nonethe-

less. As Lynne Joyrich emphasizes in this volume, television, unlike the
movies, is characterized by flow: the fragmentation of the viewing experi-
ence through segmentation, commercial interruptions, and so forth.17 Tele-
vision also differs in its address (we go to the movies, but television lives
with us). Yet perhaps the most important televisual feature for Mad Men, like
many other quality shows, is its seriality. As Mittell observes, the first decade
of the twenty-first century was remarkable in terms of the transformation
in American television, not least because of the “spread of serial narrative
across a wide range of fictional formats” (“Serial Boxes”).
As Sean O’Sullivan notes in an essay on Deadwood (hbo, 2004–6), serial
formats foster special kinds of audience engagement because they “exist at
the crossroads between the old and the new.” Unlike stand-alone novels or

films, serial dramas constantly offer the “promise of the new,” often introduc-
ing “a new plotline or character that will change everything.” Moreover, given
their “leisurely unfolding,” serials draw us “into the past, as old characters ap-
pear and disappear . . . or old episodes of a program burrow into our memory,
creating a history commensurate with our lifespan unlike the merely posited
past of a text we can consume in a few hours or days. Every reading, or every
watching, requires a reconnection of old and new, an iteration of past and
present; and within a week or a month what was new will get funneled into
the old” (117). As O’Sullivan further observes, Victorian novelists such as
Dickens understood these lived aspects of the serial form and crafted their
fiction accordingly.
The same is true of shows such as Mad Men that combine serial tempo-
rality with the writerly features of well- crafted novels. Indeed, the advent
of quality shows packaged in box sets confers the prestige of publication
on a medium once characterized by ephemeral broadcasting. The DvD box
set highlights a new narrative complexity that aligns television with classic
multiplot fiction while providing a physical object that can be displayed on
a shelf like the works of Flaubert or Trollope (Mittell, “Serial Boxes”). As
Phil Abraham says in this volume, he actually thinks of Mad Men as a novel,
an idea he shares with Matt Weiner and others who work on the show. In
this way, Mad Men is much more like a nineteenth-century novel than is The
Sopranos, which often challenged the tight diachronic arc of realist narrative
by including “stand-alone episodes” (Polan, Sopranos, 32).
These novelistic features heighten the serial audience’s engagement. Re-
corded formats offer viewers the ability to “immerse” themselves in the spec-
tator experience: “binging” on multiple episodes and reviewing particular
scenes at will (Mittell, “Serial Boxes”). Just as Victorian readers of serial
fiction published reviews, commentaries, and letters to the press, so today’s
tv viewers discuss their favorite shows at the workplace, on new social net-
works, on blogs such as Alan Sepinwall’s What’s Alan Watching?, and in the
comments section for online media from Salon and the Huffington Post to the
Los Angeles Times and the Wall Street Journal. Cable television’s reinvention
of the novelistic serial thus demonstrates the potential to summon a pub-
lic in which viewers take part even if they never attend a Mad Men theme
party.18
This communal effect is enhanced by the regular intervals of waiting
between serialized installments that encourage a daily routine of reflec-
tion and anticipation (Mittell, “Serial Boxes”). Indeed, according to Robyn
Warhol, serial narratives are “devices for structuring what bodies do in time
introDuCtion 25
and space,” their resistance to closure a means of prolonging the relation
between audience and text (72). Whether by reading a novel published in
monthly parts or viewing a television narrative that airs weekly, audiences of
serial media cultivate rituals of enjoying new installments followed by inter-
ludes of contemplation, discussion, and expectation—developing a serial
habitus. The most striking effect of the serial temporality is the generation
of feelings at once more “familiar” and “intense” than those elicited by non-
serial media (Warhol, 72).19
As the editors of this project, we have experienced these intervals of con-
templation, discussion, and expectation. In preparing this book, we have
become highly attentive to the impact of serial forms. Indeed, as we con-
clude this introduction to a volume begun after Mad Men’s third season,
we are especially conscious that many readers will have seen more of the
show than we have right now (as we write in November 2011, the fifth sea-
son of Mad Men is expected to air in March 2012). Thus, although our book
is finished, Mad Men still exists “at the crossroads between the old and the
new.” Throughout this introduction we have spoken of history, pastness, and
the longue durée; but the situation necessitates our concluding in a different
tense.
Mad Men’s pattern so far has been to slightly outpace the real time be-
tween seasons: from its debut in July 2007 to the fourth-season finale in
October 2010, the show’s calendar advanced from March 1960 to October
1965. Will the show continue to move incrementally through the 1960s? Or
will it surprise us by leaping ahead or even taking us back to the years be-
fore Don met Betty? Will Betty’s story become ever more distantiated from
the twin focal points of Don and advertising? Will Don age into the 1970s,
still a dandy but sporting wide lapels, graying sideburns, and the “dry look”?
Will Harry like Star Trek? We are not foolish enough to venture any guesses,
though we recognize that the nature of serial narrative is to orient us toward
an unforeseeable future.20
“Our worst misfortunes never happen, and most miseries lie in anticipa-
tion,” wrote the serial maestro Honoré de Balzac—an aphorism that Mad
Men has paraphrased twice.21 In The Sense of an Ending, a book he collected
from lectures delivered in 1965, the literary critic Frank Kermode speculated
that human beings turn to fiction to escape from the emptiness of time. “The
clock’s ‘tick tock’” suggests the stories we call “plots,” which are vehicles for
“humanizing time by giving it a form” (45). That is, by providing us with the
meanings we grasp from “the sense of an ending,” fictions seem to redeem us
from time. (As Don might say, fictions provide a special kind of solace from

the overwhelming perception that “the universe is indifferent” [1.8].) For
the ancient Greeks, whose preferred form was drama, the sense of an ending
came from tragedy. But serial forms do not promise the sense of an ending:
to the contrary, their special illusion is that they will never end at all. Instead,
the attachments we cultivate to the temporality of the episode, the season,
and the intervals in between give us a different way to humanize the clock.
Serial narratives, premised on the perpetual possibility of the new, intuit
this fact; they know that audiences lead serial lives poised between what has
already happened and what cannot yet be foreseen.
As Mad Men embeds its characters in a stream of events that viewers rec-
ognize as the historical past, the effect it most often creates is not tragedy,
with its powerful sense of an ending, but dramatic irony, with its intimation
of lessons learned and resolutions still to come. We glimpse, for example, in
season 3, an invitation to Margaret Sterling’s wedding, realizing that the day
will be ruined by a terrible event. We watch the action unfold before charac-
ters who, unlike us, do not know what they are about to encounter. Then too,
sometimes Mad Men’s savvy writers have fun with their audience, inventing
fictitious figures to send fact-finding fans to their search engines in vain.22
Sometimes the irony works in both directions. When Joan’s husband joined
the army to complete his medical training, many anticipated that the not-so-
good doctor was heading for Vietnam. “The guy is toast,” viewers opined on
cell phones, blogs, and message boards. Will Dr. Harris outlive their specu-
lations? Perhaps by now, reader, You Know Better.
The “promise of the new” is irresistible to us because our greatest hopes
(like our worst fears) lie in anticipation. Advertising knows this too and
tempts us to believe that the next great experience will come through some
novel purchase. As a show about advertising, Mad Men shows us how fre-
quently our fond expectations of the future disappoint us. In this way, an
insistent dramatic irony runs through the series. In “Ladies Room” (1.2), for
example, the agency works on an ad for an antiperspirant in a newfangled
form: the aerosol can. The irony here is how quickly today’s hot product be-
comes tomorrow’s environmental hazard. Who knew? Not, in this instance,
Paul, who is ready to label the product “space-age”: “It’s from the future—
a place so close to us now, filled with wonder and ease.” Don, however, is
skeptical: “Some people think of the future and it upsets them. They see a
rocket and they start building a bomb shelter.” Yet in season 3 their roles are
reversed. When Paul barely contains his contempt for a client who plans to
raze Penn Station, a magnificent Beaux Arts structure from 1910, Don saves
the day with a vision of a new New York as a “city on a hill” (3.2).
introDuCtion 27
Even if this pitch did not include a glowing reference to California, Don’s
words would be an ironic prelude to the protagonist of season 4’s finale,
“Tomorrowland” (4.13). A Disney exhibit filled with midcentury visions of
space-age travel like the twa Moonliner, Tomorrowland is the destination
for Don’s visit with his children and his secretary, Megan. Perhaps we could
have guessed that the man who lost the Hilton account because he couldn’t
deliver “the moon” would never make it into the space age. Instead, Don
finds his future in an uncanny repetition of the past. The closing music for
the episode is “I Got You Babe,” the pop hit by Sonny and Cher from 1965—
the same song that greets Bill Murray every morning when he wakes up
in the movie Groundhog Day (1993), in which Murray plays Phil Connors, a
narcissistic weatherman trapped in the events of a single day.
In Groundhog Day, the sense of an ending comes when the protagonist
becomes a better person. Connors hankers for his producer (Andie Mac-
Dowell), and when he finally transforms into a man she can love, he wakes
up beside her and knows that Tomorrowland has come. Like Groundhog Day,
Mad Men’s fourth season posed the question of whether a man thoroughly
devastated by mistakes of his own making can change. Of course, change is
a loaded idea for Mad Men: while the show is a modern-day realist narrative,
it has never yet been a bildungsroman in which the narrative trajectory co-
incides with the protagonist’s moral growth. Rather, Don is an antihero—
albeit one who convinces us that he is somehow better than the world that
made him. We must believe in Don’s nobler instincts and thrill to his mo-
ments of transcendence even while knowing that if he ever sustained them,
he would no longer be Don, and we would no longer be watching Mad Men.
This is the irony of our serial viewership: watching Don reinvent himself in
the face of a new challenge, inspiration, or object of desire, we somehow for-
get that We Should Know Better.
Yet for all their evasion of the sense of an ending, even the longest-
running serial narratives eventually end. To be sure, some television forms
extend over a seemingly endless period of time: General Hospital (abC) has
aired since 1963, and M*A*S*H (Cbs, 1972–83) lasted eight years longer than
the Korean War. Mad Men is now poised to continue for as many as seven
seasons. But whereas soap operas occupy the diurnal temporality of their
broadcast and M*A*S*H elongated a particular historical span, a historical
fiction such as Mad Men, which moves forward into a knowable stream of
events, has a harder creative burden to bear. What will Mad Men be like if, ad-
vancing into the decade, it no longer pivots on the premise of looking at the

pre-counterculture 1960s from a post-counterculture vantage point? Mad
Men will then have to do what so far it never has: tell us what it thinks about
those 1960s. It will need to open itself to newly empowered voices—voices
either excluded from or marginalized in a mise-en-scène that was first imag-
ined as a vehicle to articulate white male privilege and insularity.
Perhaps some new character development will emerge that changes the
show’s center of gravity (an aggressive Megan? a teenage Sally? a renegade
Pete? A civil rights or anti-war narrative?). But so far Mad Men, when not
about the Draper marriage and its adulterous satellites, has made the dialec-
tic of Don and Peggy its emotional center. Indeed, Don could not have been
so compelling a character were he not also Peggy’s mentor and (usually) sup-
porter. Don’s words at Peggy’s hospital bedside (taken up in Rushing’s chap-
ter); Peggy’s bailing Don out of the lockup; Don’s telling Peggy he would
spend his life trying to hire her; and, in season 4, Peggy’s taking Anna’s place
as the one person who understands Don are among Mad Men’s most memo-
rable moments. If the show were about the sense of an ending, there could
be plenty to say about a Peggy ready to move on from her apprenticeship and
take the leading role in her own Peggy-roman. But can Peggy thrive in the
world of advertising, the quintessence of alienated creativity in the show’s
symbolic economy? Is the young woman Don helped to rescue from the
stigma of unwed motherhood destined to become another version of Don?
And what about Don? The show pulls us toward him because he only very
partially embodies the fantasy of a resilient masculine will-to-power. Para-
doxically, Don works as a serial character because again and again he man-
ages to be just one step away from the abyss into which we see him drop in
the opening credits; and because the fallen world over which he walks his
tightrope feels so palpably real. Don, in other words, is imbued with the
sense of an ending, but it is an ending that viewers want to defer. We know
Don will fall, but we do not want him to—yet.
notes
1. See http://www.theawl.com/tag/footnotes-of-mad-men (accessed 21 May 2011).

2. On the books, see Vulture; on the living room, see Grad. On “Mad Style,” see
Tom and Lorenzo’s series of blog posts at http://www.tomandlorenzo.com/category
/television/mad-men. According to the Times, only hbo’s Deadwood generated
comparable discussion about the “authenticity of its language” (Zimmer).
3. Compare Mad Men to a show that unabashedly condescends toward the past:
introDuCtion 29
Life on Mars (bbC, 2006–7; remade in the United States for abC in 2008–9). The
conceit of a present-day detective trapped in the 1970s of his childhood enables the
protagonist’s contrast between his own enlightened ethics and the sexism and cor-
ruption depicted as endemic to the 1970s. See also Michael Bérubé’s discussion of
Pleasantville in this volume.
4. Emails to Lauren Goodlad, 10 September 2010.
5. Discussion of Betty’s being one of the worst mothers in media history can take
on misogynistic overtones or the reverse. Blogger Kevin Fitzpatrick ranked Betty
twenty-third in a list of “tv ’s most undeniably horrible mothers,” describing her
“as one of the most universally reviled characters on television.” Yet in response to
“Betty Draper: Is She as Bad as She Seems?,” a post by Amy Graff on the San Fran-
cisco Chronicle blog The Mommy Files, one respondent wrote, “She married a guy who
swept her off her feet, started pumping her full of children and then rarely showed
up at home. It’s really hard raising kids alone. Then she finds out he’s using an as-
sumed name, has been married and has been sleeping with most of the women on
the East Coast behind her back. . . . No adult in the show cares about her, and she was
trained to keep her troubles to herself ” (lovescats789, 29 July 2010).
6. While critics often see self-referentiality as distinct from the character-driven,
naturalist narrative we have so far described, we think realism’s capacity for irony
and self-referentiality is underestimated.
7. As the feminist critic Gail Finney points out, the current usage of “queer” re-
flects its development from the Low German for “oblique or off- center” into the
contemporary German quer (“diagonally, sideways, or against the grain”) and the
English queer (“strange, odd, deviant”). Finney, 122.
8. However, for additional reflection on Mad Men and race in light of season 5, see
Goodlad and Levine, “You’ve Come.”
9. On the “magic negro,” a simple black character who exerts extraordinary impact
on white lives, see, for example, Hughey. In Haynes’s version of the trope, the char-
acter is more sophisticated, though still fundamentally “magical.”
10. On earlier uses of the term with reference to prestige comedies like The Mary
Tyler Moore Show, see Feuer, “MtM Enterprises.”
11. The 11.9 million viewers who tuned in for the finale of The Sopranos in 2007 rep-
resented a “historical feat” for cable; the 5.1 million viewers drawn three years later
to the season 3 premiere for hbo’s youth-oriented True Blood are cited as the next-
best showing for a cable station (Associated Press; Andreeva). This makes Mad Men’s
3 million viewers considerable even if numerous commentators rightly suggest that
the show’s “buzz” exceeds its viewership or ability to attract advertising.
12. For a video of the event, which featured the broadcasting of the premiere on
Times Square, see “Mad Men on the Street,” New York, http://videos.nymag.com
/video/Mad-Men-On-The-Street;Drunk-Men (accessed 29 May 2011).
13. The study, however, defined “social liberals” somewhat questionably as those

who “disdain moral authorities and believe children should be exposed to moral
dilemmas and allowed to draw their own conclusions” (Bulk).
14. The Fresh Air interviews were originally broadcast on 9 August 2007, 22 Sep-
tember 2008, 26 July 2010, and 16 September 2010.
15. One cake altered the iconic Draper silhouette to show a woman’s hairdo and
the logo “Mad Mom”—a Mother’s Day gift for a Mad Men fan. See Masket.
16. “Drabbles” are probably named after a Monty Python sketch featuring a game
called Drabble in which whoever writes a novel first wins. “Portrait of a One Night
Stand” is an example of “slash fiction” in which mainstream, heteronormative media
culture is repurposed to show a homoerotic romance.
17. Although some recorded formats remove the evidence of flow, it remains part
of the Dvr experience even for viewers who fast-forward through the interruptions.
18. Michael Warner’s notion of the counterpublic summoned by the circulation of
print thus applies to the serial television text.
19. For Mittell, the asynchronous and potentially solitary viewing of the DvD-
watcher inhibits “communal engagement” (“Serial Boxes”). This effect may be more
typical of a forensic show such as Lost (abC, 2004–10) than a neonaturalist and
highly novelistic narrative such as Mad Men. That is, Mad Men’s community of en-
gagement seems to integrate participation of late-coming DvD-watching viewers
alongside those who keep up with the latest episodes.
20. As this volume goes into production in July 2012, the editors of this volume
have viewed (and blogged on) season 5—but we retain our concluding comments as
they were written in 2011. It turned out that Betty did indeed become more and more
distanced from the show’s focus; and it was Paul, not Harry, who became a Trek fan.
21. In “Out of Town” (3.1), Sal condenses it to “Our worst fears lie in anticipation,”
and Don says the same in “The Fog” (3.5).
22. For example, the pointed reference to “Dr. Lyle Evans” in “The Chrysanthe-
mum and the Sword,” a subject of much Internet chatter as viewers developed a con-
sensus that the man did not exist.
introDuCtion 31
lauren M. e. Goodlad is associate professor of English at the University of Illinois,
Urbana-Champaign, and director of the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory.
She is the coeditor of Goth: Undead Subculture (2007) and the author of The Victo-
rian Geopolitical Aesthetic: Realism, Sovereignty, and Transnational Experience (forth-
coming).
lilya KaGanovsKy is associate professor of Slavic, comparative literature, and media

and cinema studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is the au-
thor of How the Soviet Man Was Unmade (2008).
robert a. rushinG is associate professor of Italian and comparative literature at the

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of Resisting Arrest: De-
tective Fiction and Popular Culture (2007).
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Mad men, mad world : sex, politics, style, and the 1960s /
Lauren M. E. Goodlad, Lilya Kaganovsky,
and Robert A. Rushing, eds.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-8223-5402-4 (cloth : alk. paper)
isbn 978-0-8223-5418-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Mad men (Television program). 2. Television programs—
Social aspects—United States. 3. Television programs—
United States—History and criticism. i. Goodlad,
Lauren M. E. ii. Kaganovsky, Lilya.
iii. Rushing, Robert A.
Pn1992.77.M226M337 2013
791.45′72—dc23 2012033726

Mad Men, Mad World by Lauren M. E. Goodlad, Lilya Kaganovsky, and Robert A. Rushing

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the best oF everythinG

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“you’ll love the Way it MaKes you Feel”

Consider historical fiction as it typically appears on television: Foyle’s War

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it’s not a sCienCe

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It is testimony to Mad Men’s status as a “cultural phenomenon” that in intro-

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If Mad Men is “cinematic” television at its finest, it is television nonethe-

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1. See http://www.theawl.com/tag/footnotes-of-mad-men (accessed 21 May 2011).

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lilya KaGanovsKy is associate professor of Slavic, comparative literature, and media

robert a. rushinG is associate professor of Italian and comparative literature at the

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

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